Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Peter Cain, the next exhibition in his galleries at 1062
North Orange Grove and 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard. Cain’s first one-person exhibition in Los
Angeles since 1990, it features paintings, drawings, and collages made between the late 1980s and
1997, when the artist died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of thirty-seven.

Peter Cain first achieved fame in the early 1990s for his paintings of distorted automobiles. Rendered
with precision, their gleaming surfaces intensified the seductiveness of the advertising images on which
they were based. A critic at the time called them “literal and figurative icons of autoeroticism.” The
exhibition includes the full scope of these paintings, from classic muscle cars to late-model sedans.
Prelude #3 (1990), for example, depicts a Honda sports coupe distilled to a single wheel and fender.
Like many of his paintings from this period, it began with an image cut from a magazine and
reconfigured into a hallucinatory new form. Several of Cain’s preparatory collages are on view for the
first time, along with sketches, source photos, and notebooks from the artist’s archive.

In 1995, in a departure from the cars, Cain began a new series of paintings. Each composition — part
figure study, part landscape — depicts his boyfriend Sean’s reclining head and shoulders on a beach.
These new works signaled, in the words of critic Peter Schjeldahl, “the creation of a new high style
able intelligently to capture intimate nuances of contemporary Eros on a public scale.” The following
year Cain took up another new subject: paintings and drawings of gas stations and strip malls around
Los Angeles. Though rendered with the same attention to detail, these works omit all typography
from the retail landscape, an abstracting device similar to his mutated automobiles.

This exhibition celebrates the publication of Peter Cain, the first complete monograph on the artist’s
work, featuring essays by Beau Rutland, Richard Meyer, and Collier Schorr, and illustrated with over
eighty full-color plates of Cain’s paintings and works on paper, as well as photographs of his studios
and other archival material, most published here for the first time.

Peter Cain was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1959. He moved to New York City in 1977 to attend
art school, and lived there until his death. His first one-person exhibition was at Pat Hearn Gallery in
New York in 1989, and since then his work has been shown in museum and gallery exhibitions across
Europe and the United States, including the 1993 and 1995 Whitney Biennials. His first one-person
exhibition with Matthew Marks took place in New York in 1992, the year after the gallery opened.

Peter Cain is on view at 1062 North Orange Grove and 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard from June 24
to September 1, 2017, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

M+B is pleased to announce Matte Black Marks, Matte Black Pictures, Phil Chang's second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition runs from June 29 through August 31, 2017, with an opening reception on Thursday, June 29 from 6 to 8 pm.

Matte Black Marks, Matte Black Pictures extends Chang’s investigation into what constitutes a picture in an inkjet era. From his Cache, Active series of unfixed and unstable gelatin silver prints, to his monochromes printed from digital files, to his works on paper using inkjet printer ink—each body of work endeavors to reveal the medium’s necessary support structures. By focusing on the forms of production and materiality, Chang is able to call attention to the unique potential of the photographic image to function simultaneously as commodity, artifact for cultural significance and object for philosophical investigation.

The new works on paper in the exhibition were made by manually applying matte black inkjet printer ink directly onto the surfaces of matte inkjet paper using foam brushes. The materials used were third-party bottled ink manufactured by Vermont PhotoInkjet applied to inkjet paper manufactured by Canson, Epson and Hahnemühle. Each of the works was hinged on Cool White, acid-free Museum Board and framed under OP3 Acrylic at Art Services Melrose.

A variation of marks will be on view including single marks, multiple marks and Chang’s attempts at covering entire sheets of inkjet paper with matte black ink. In several of the works, Chang has manually applied matte black ink to actual inkjet prints that display variations of grey. On close inspection, it is difficult to discern any differences between the results of the printer or that of Chang’s labor due to the absorbing qualities and flat surface of inkjet paper.

The exhibition emphasizes the material properties and economic conditions of inkjet media, as seen in the works’ titles, the collision of third-party ink and a dominant brand’s paper product and the choice of solely using matte black ink and matte surfaces of inkjet paper. The works here reflect inkjet printing developments where the goal of achieving dense blacks resulted in the creation of two different black inks, each optimized for a certain type of paper: photo black ink for glossy papers and matte black ink for matte papers. The latter relationship informed the works for this exhibition.

Phil Chang (b. 1974, Elkhart, IN) received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. Recent solo exhibitions include Monochromes, Static and Unfixed at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside and Cache, Active at LA><ART, as well as a forthcoming solo exhibition at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY. Recent institutional group shows include Light Play: Experiments in Photography, 1970 to the Present at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; About Time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Unfixed: The Fugitive Image at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Transformer Station, OH. Chang’s work has been written about in ARTFORUM, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Aperture, Blind Spot, IMA Magazine and C-Photo. Other published texts include those with Charlotte Cotton, James Welling and Walter Benn Michaels, and an artist’s book Four Over One, published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Curatorial projects have included Soft Target at M+B, Affective Turns? at Pepin Moore and Seeing Sight at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. His work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the California Museum of Photography, Riverside. Phil Chang lives and works in Los Angeles.

M+B is pleased to announce Chijyo, Ryosuke Yazaki’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition runs from June 29 through August 31, 2017, with an opening reception on Thursday, June 29 from 6 to 8 pm.

Ryosuke Yazaki’s ancient crafts shape the most modern bodies, their colors like the faded flags of nations not yet invented: futurist denims and pierced midnights, old bone and sunburst sherbets. They billow and curve from carved wood and terracotta, cluster and angle into unruly crystals and galactic flora, ancient architectures from advanced civilizations. They’re always ever bent just enough to be handled by humans rather than merely erupted from caverns or blossomed from alien landscapes. Then again, who can tell what minerals might cluster with these dusted skins or grow in gravities and atmospheres yet discovered. Some bodies here bend out of marshmallow sheets or curve into fourth-dimensional pillows. One curls into a flower that then melts into a tongue. However otherworldly, they move with a force that’s simply and powerfully natural.

In graceful definitions, Yazaki lists the specific qualities hidden behind the lovely words of his materials.

Hinoki – Very fragrant, straight and easy to carve wood, used for houses and baths in Japan.
Sawara – A kind of cypress, fragrant, soft, easy to carve and reddish. Used for baths.
Kusunoki – Camphor wood used in traditional Japanese architecture, Buddhist sculpture, and cabinetry. It is used especially for chests, drawers, and boxes as it naturally repels insects. Aromatic, easy to use and carve.
Tonoko – Powder used to seal wood; it is mainly used as a foundation of the surface before painting
Gofun – White paint made from seashells
Yamabuki – A yellow paint named after the Kerria flower

Fragrant woods and seashells and flowers. The title for the show, Chijyo, translates to “above ground.” Whether growing up or mined out, either definition works. It would be easy to associate the natural tactile beauty of Barbara Hepworth’s carvings or Isamu Noguchi’s stones, space colony landscapes from 70s sci-fi illustrative speculations with colors from the lively squiggles of Jonathan Lasker. One or two of these sculptures wouldn’t look out of place in the background of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. These sculptures can also exist as purely what they are in color, form and material. Such shapely works can carry as few or as many meanings and associations as you want.

Born in the 60s in Japan, Yazaki follows his grandfather as a master carver, studying in England and later learned a thing or three from computer graphics. Those unearthly shapes from digital design inform the skeletons that Yazaki shapes into souls, but they are all made by hand and designed out of the materials themselves. “I mainly draw the movement of the particles making up the shape,” he says “like a skeleton, and make it like a life. It expresses a solid form, such that a soul can be felt from an abstract consciousness.”

Perhaps they are abstractions, but they most certainly have soul.

Ryosuke Yazaki (b. 1965, Tokyo) received his fine art degree from Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan. After traveling to England to study sculpture, he returned to Japan and had solo exhibitions at Tateshina-kogen Art Museum, Nagano, Japan; Galileo Okabe, Tokyo, Japan; The National Art Center, Tokyo; Ginza Art Hall, Tokyo; and Smith’s Gallery, London. He has received awards from Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology; the Kuukanjikugunzo Art Mirai Grand Prize and the Tokyo Parliament Award. Ryosuke Yazaki lives and works in Tokyo.

August 25 to October 14, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, August 25th 6-8pm

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

We are pleased to announce the opening of the group exhibition “Back to the Shack”, an adventurous group show experience curated by widely unknown expressionist painter André Butzer from Germany.

Butzer has invited artists from all over the United States and Europe. The show can be seen as the only legitimate following-up event to what took place in early February 2017 in New York, “Lob des Schattens - DJ Piet Mondrian´s Sister in the Year 2849- and her books (from Vienna)”, an exhibition project Butzer helped to organize alongside infamous NY-artist John Newsom, whom Butzer got to know as a true and honest brother already during those now long-gone years that both pals had been exhibiting continuously out there in the Santa Monica/California neighborhood.

“Back to the Shack”, opposed to the New York sensation “Lob des Schattens”, will not be a wide-open and popping-up-type presentation, rather it will be a much less spontaneous concept considered as a whole experimental unit. One has chosen to refine an artistic and social interrelation that moreover will create a magic and surprising surrounding for this very special and focused exhibition space at Meliksetian/Briggs Gallery.

In the same way, this interrelation will serve Butzer´s very own and very current coming-back scenario to the L.A. scene, a scene he already had entered secretly as a young man in early 2001, and eventually had left behind only shortly after, to remain as a more or less influential, but wild painter.

The status of object in art is what is to be scrutinized within this ambitious exhibition project. There is an overall tendency of transcending this crucial status in as good as all of the works on display here. Also, the display is not what it is about: there is an escalation of the status of the display itself leading towards a super elevation of deep detection and full perception. Destiny and doom, both are ringing like potential golden bells throughout our open minds as viewers and very friendly participators.”

Los Angeles-based artist Milano Chow has established a consistent aesthetic that subtly incorporates collage effects into intricate graphite drawings of architectural environments. Chow’s works reference several types of architectural forms, both interior and exterior, and commonly focus on decorative elements and grand spaces. In Surreal fragments of scenes and tight close-ups of building facades, Chow’s collaged figures quietly inhabit their spaces, often partially visible through windows. With both filmic and graphic qualities that feel slightly more perfect than reality, the beautifully rendered architectural elements are sharp and clean and contemporary, like designer stages for high fashion photography built to feel like Old European aristocratic elegance. The collaged figures, pulled from high fashion magazines, appear contemporary yet somehow also timeless. They seem to wander in their spaces much like models or actors, projecting emotive qualities like longing, vulnerability, and loss with robotic precision, but without the ability to truly connect with one another.

The interdisciplinary practice of Los Angeles-based artist Ann Greene Kelly is driven by sculptural combines that often affect found materials with hand-made additions and alterations. A brick pattern engraved in white plaster completely covers the surface of a sculptural composition. Upon closer examination the sculptural arrangement is revealed to be a connected encirclement of child-sized chairs encased in something like miniature white brick scale skin, as if some sort of cartoon parasite had entered real life and grown all over or from within the chairs, forever encrusting them together in a shared circle. Hovering between benign household objects, real societal detritus, and fantasy wasteland, Kelly’s objects take on anthropomorphic qualities like vulnerability and hope. They seem to promise that the vulnerable, the abused, and the disenfranchised will always continue their meek march forward despite the absurdity of life and despite the inevitable crushing reality.

The small-scale assemblage/paintings by San Antonio-based artist Daniel Rios Rodriguez are characterized by regional specificity, non-canonical aesthetic inspiration, and iconography. His work is linked to regional folk and craft histories while simultaneously referencing canonical impasto painting and assemblage. Rodriguez produces unique shaped painting surfaces for semi-pictorial iconographic compositions painted in heavy impasto, with additional sculptural relief provided by simple found materials like nails, stones, and rope. The impasto quality of the painting bursts out of the small tight spaces and defined graphic edges of the imagery. The found objects are painted and arranged to work as components embedded in the imagery and framing devices, or as separately defined objects that feel like spiritual trinkets or offerings at an alter. Allusions to mystical and symbolic pictorial information run through the paintings, with specific attention to indigenous American iconography.

Andy Warhol’s fascination with the features and shape of women’s lips can be traced back to his earliest personal work in addition to his work as a commercial illustrator. It flourished in his most iconic works of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and even Chairman Mao, where Warhol would highlight his subjects’ lips, outlining and coloring each pair of lips in ways that made them the focal point of each painting. As if to prove this point, in 1962 he made the painting “Marilyn’s Lips”– a diptych that isolated and repeated Marilyn’s lips 168 times; the painting is now in the collection of the Hirsshorn Museum.

For four decades, the depiction of lips was a touchstone for Warhol — a signature trademark that he returned to again and again in varied forms. It is tempting to read into this. Were his renderings of lips an expression of the artist’s sublimated need for love, or sex, or communication? Was he interested in the individuality of each pair of lips? The form? The suggestiveness? All of the above?

While Warhol had started doing occasional commissioned portraits in the 1960s, by the 1970s it had become his main source of income and a relentless focus of his attention. To make these portraits he would take a Polaroid picture of the sitter which was then transferred to an enlarged silkscreen. Tracing simple outlines onto the canvas first, Warhol would underpaint the mouth and eye area so that when the silkscreen was applied on top those features would stand out. As always, it was his subject’s lips that interested Warhol the most, so much that in 1975 – always the avid bookmaker – Warhol created three different unique albums printing and/or collaging images of more than 60 different pairs of lips onto the album pages. Andy Warhol: Lips showcases twenty-five works from one of these books; of the other two, one is in the collection of The Warhol Museum and the other remains with the Warhol Foundation.

The process is unusual. The lips are silkscreened onto various different tapes, from masking tape to packing tape to scotch tape, and then placed and adhered on to the 8 x 8 1⁄2” page. Because of the thin width of most of the tapes the substrate tape is laid down in layers. Sometimes the tape is laid down roughly and unevenly, other times the tape is trimmed to the outer edges of the lips. Most of the pairs of lips are hastily filled in, with clearly outlined edges. Color saturation is such that sometimes they look like black shapes, here and there fading into grey. They become simple forms, and the original photograph disappears beneath the pattern. The very handmade nature of each collage stands in interesting counterpoint to Warhol’s proclaimed interest in the machine-made and the hands-off approach he adopted throughout his career.

Until one of the “Lips” albums was exhibited at The Warhol Museum, the Morgan Library in their “Warhol: By the Book” shows (2015 – 2016) and reproduced in part in the extensive monograph “The Warhol Look” (1997), these particular types of work were virtually unknown. However, we now can see these unique collages as pure Warhol – isolated, mysterious, and glamorous. Repeating and varying in form, hovering between figurative and abstraction, each singular piece tells its own story and presents its own seductive identity in true Warhol fashion.

Wall Dancers brings together a group of Gene Beery’s text paintings that defy convention as they appear to be paused in motion across the walls. The paintings, installed, appear as if they’ve endured a California earthquake. The shake up continues into the canvases themselves leaving deconstructed words for the viewer to decipher. The word “TRA” is repeated on multiple canvases demonstrating Beery’s idiosyncratic view of art. “TRA” is both “art” spelled backwards and an extension of the word “etcetera.”

Beery interjects playfulness at every turn. His works continually poke fun at art world rigidity and the worthiness of a painting on canvas. Using humble materials and quick confident marks, he brushes through minimalism and pop sensibilities in one stroke.

Gene Beery (b. 1937 Racine, Wisconsin) lives and works in Sutter Creek, California. Recent exhibitions include Early Paintings / Later Photographs at Algus Greenspon (New York, NY); Keeping a Close Eye on the Wind with Joshua Abelow at Bodega (New York, NY) and I Dropped the Lemon Tart at Lisa Cooley (New York, NY). Beery has been the recipient of many awards and grants including the California State Fair Award of Excellence for Painting, N.E.A. Artist’s Books Grant and the William and Noma Copley Foundation Award for Visual Art.

SoLA is pleased to present recent Installations and paintings by Meeson Pae Yang following her inaugural artist residency at SBC SoLA. Meeson Pae Yang began her residency June 1, 2017 at SoLA and used the entire gallery space as a site of exploration for new installations, sculptures, and drawings. Her residency has culminated in a solo exhibition at from August 12 – September 2, 2017.

You can see images of her residency and work in progress on her Facebook and Instagram pages:

Yang’s work features large-scale installations exploring drawing in space based on natural phenomena. The installation is composed of layered drawings, sculptures, and found objects. As with most of Yang’s work, she explores transformation of materials - keenly observing details and documenting, arranging, and aggregating these objects into densely layered forms using repetition, scale, and light. Yang’s work explores the tension and dialogue between location/dislocation, micro/macro, permanent/transient, coalescing into expansive installations undulating throughout architectural spaces.

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South Bay Contemporary SoLA is a non-profit art organization supporting advanced explorations in Contemporary art. SBC SoLA welcomes curators and artists who are tapping into issues of our time to produce and present art that expands on current perspectives of diverse culture. SBC SoLA connects local, national and international artists providing an innovative place for community to discover creative freedom within the open structure of contemporary art.

Steve Turner is pleased to present Carne World Tour, an exhibition by Adriana Martínez, Mariana Murcia, Juan Sebastián Peláez and Santiago Pinyol, members of the Bogota-based artist collective Carne Gallery. The artists will present works that reuse everyday objects and images, and in so doing, they accentuate both hidden and obvious aspects of daily life. Using wit, repetition and decontextualization, the artists seek to create second thoughts about familiar objects and images, the things that are often right in front of us and that may go unnoticed.The four artists will live in Los Angeles for the month prior to the exhibition and will create their works with locally sourced materials. Instead of shipping art created in Colombia, they hope that their activity in Los Angeles will imbue their works with something that is both local and global.Carne Gallery (established 2014) exhibits at art fairs, airbnbs, and partner galleries around the world and it promotes activities in Colombia by presenting exhibitions by foreign artists, presenting talks and hosting parties.